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Essay: Time and Memory in La Jetée, 2001 and Solaris

Inspired by listening to Dan North’s podcast of an old blog post about 2001, I decided to pull up my own work about the SF-classic and rework an essay I wrote in 2005 while at Edinburgh University for this blog. Instead of a bibliography, I have included links to the sources I used.

La Jetée

The connection between science fiction narratives and the cheap pulp format in which they were originally published was never really broken. Science fiction is still regarded by many as either (like its closest relative, the fantasy genre) escapist fairy tale spectacle or as technophile gibberish for nerds. The perception of the genre is in several ways still dominated by cheap productions of the thirties and forties like Flash Gordon (USA 1936) and its epigones, the big budget film franchises like Star Wars (USA 1977 – 2005) and Star Trek (USA 1979 – 2002).

However, behind the surface of weird-looking aliens and travel in fantastic space ships, some directors who usually do not tend too much towards the overtly fantastic in their films find the ideal ground to explore ideas not easily realised in other settings. Science fiction, then, with its basic notion of travelling beyond the (so far) earthly possible, often becomes a scenic background for the exploration of philosophical and ideological ideas.

For the purpose of this essay, I wish to look at three of these films, Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée (F 1962), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (USA 1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (USSR 1972). I will explore their relationship with and concepts of time and memory, hoping to connect the films’ genre aspects with their philosophical reflections.

Rather then simply setting a story in a possible future, one of science fiction’s most important tropes has always been time travel. A scientist first journeyed into the future in H. G. Wells’s influential novel The Time Machine from 1895, only to find that the degradation of his planet, humankind splitting into an aristocratic and a proletarian race and eventually disappearing completely, is inevitable, because the seeds have long since been sown in his present day. And although time travel narratives are often about the attempt to temper with and eventually change time and causality, a good many of them end in the same conclusion as Wells’s novel: Even with time travel, human destiny is inevitable and fixed.

“There is no way out of time” is also one of the central statements in Chris Marker’s 1962 time travel short film La Jetée. In the film, a man in a postapocalyptic setting is haunted by an image from his childhood: The face of a woman opposite a dying man. Trying to re-capture this memory of peacetime, he travels back in time only to find that the man he saw as a child was his older self. Causality comes full circle, the human destiny is inevitable.
Gilbert Fulmer, in his excellent article about the “Cosmological Implications of Time Travel” explains, how these conclusions are necessarily connected to a certain idea of how time works, an idea that is different from the way it is presented in classic science fiction films like Back to the Future (USA 1984), but probably more realistic. In this view, time is both simultaneous and unalterable.

Bruce Kawin, in his 1982 article on La Jetée, uses the image of a reel of film to illustrate this notion: “On the reel, thousands of frames maintain their images of potential instants, all together and retrievable. As the film moves through the projector, the images become ‘present’” (16). Time travel, then, would not change time, because it does not “cause the past to be repeated” (Fulmer 33), i.e. the images on the reel of the film do not change when the film is rewound. In the same vein, causal loops, “in which the later event is cause by the earlier event and the earlier by the later” (ibid.), like the one in La Jetée, also become possible: It makes no difference that the dying man seen by the child is in fact his older self, because at the time of seeing him, the child has no recollection of the future, even though that future is existing at the same instant in time.

In his article, Fulmer draws interesting cosmological conclusions from these assertions, most importantly the one that intelligent life might be its own creator: “The time travelling hypothesis suggests that some intelligent being or beings, having presumably discovered the Big Bang from the same sort of evidence we did, perceived the necessity of bringing it about […] travelled backward in time and did whatever was necessary to initiate the Big Bang” (36).

Time and the human destiny are thus inseparably linked in science fiction, and the notion that “there is no way out of time” seems to resonate in all the films that are subject of this essay. In 2001, while there is no time travel as such, the destiny of humankind is influenced by an exterior force from the very “Dawn of Time” onwards.

The alien monolith, placed in the midst of the pre-human primates in a prehistoric age, will define man’s destiny for a very long time, as the most famous match cut of film history, from a simple manual weapon to a gigantic bomb circling earth’s orbit, clearly shows. Man cannot escape his own destiny in time; the path is set out before him like the reel of a film. And, just as in La Jetée, 2001 also ends with an image of causality coming full circle: Astronaut Dave Bowman, after having progressed “beyond the infinite” and after having aged many decades in a number of minutes, regresses back into a child, the very image of innocence and impressionability. Man has, yet again, not succeeded in freeing himself from the dictatorship of his own destiny. (NB: There are more optimistic interpretations of the enigmatic ending).

Chris Kelvin, at the end of Solaris, seemingly returns home and has a scene of mythical atonement with his father. However, the final pullback reveals that the scene of atonement, just like Kelvin’s wife through the rest of the film, is nothing more than one of Solaris’s simulacra, an empty image recreated out of Kelvin’s inner desires. Ultimately, as in La Jetée, there is no return to the past; what has happened, has happened, the destiny of mankind was fixed since the beginning of time.

La Jetée probably utilizes the most poignant technique to visualize this notion of the destiny of mankind being trapped in time, as if on a reel of film. The film, called a “photo-roman” in the credits, consists almost exclusively of still frames, connected by cuts, dissolves and a continuous soundtrack. Time in La Jetée is not represented by movement in space but by stasis. In consequence, La Jetée becomes a reflection on both “the stasis of the accessible instant” and “the ways consciousness transforms what it observes and presents” (Kawin 15).

Kawin explains, how the protagonist’s desire to break out of the prison of his captors can be equated with his desire to break out of the “overwhelming imagery of stasis” (17) in the film. At one point, in the middle of the film, he succeeds – albeit maybe only in a dream. The sequence shows his beloved in bed, sleeping. The first image dissolves into another, slightly different one, then into yet another. “Soon the dissolves are between stills that are very similar to each other, as if each dissolve bridged a painfully slight movement between still positions. […] It is as if she, or the film, wakes up. She opens her eyes and blinks” (Kawin 18). The movement lasts only an instant, then the images are stills again.

Kawin concludes that her moving may be a dream. It is a dream of escape from stasis, a dream of movement. To escape from time would be for him to join her in a world where they could move, or where their love would feel as transfigurative and transcendent and romantic as movement would be when compared to a world of stasis and doom. (18f.)

Following Kawin’s argument, it is interesting to note that while the protagonist succeeds in escaping the visual prison of time in this moment by accelerating the dissolves from one still image to another until they become “regular” cinematic movement of 24 frames per second, he stays helpless in the finale of the film. Running towards his beloved down the Pier at Orly, the rhythm of the editing becomes faster, until there is “one still per leg movement, and shots’ durations are approximately those of actual running” (ibid). However, the hero does not succeed. No dissolves bring the images close together, “the symbolic impression is that he cannot break into continuous movement but is locked in a series of stills” (ibid.). At this moment, he is shot, and just as he was not able to escape his captors, he realises that “there is no way out of time.”

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick finds a very different possibility to investigate cinematic time and its relationship to duration. The result is that 2001, to most spectators, still lingers, as Renata Adler, reviewing the film for the New York Times in 1968, put it, “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring”. A lot of actions in 2001 happen in real time – as opposed to cinematic time only focusing on movement progressing the narrative. Kubrick uses his representation of duration to underline the fact that while man is on the verge of conquering space and going “beyond the infinite”, he is still subordinated to time.

After jumping 4 million years in a single cut as described above, the film needs more than five minutes to depict the docking of Heywood Floyd’s shuttle with the orbital station and keeps up this tempo for great parts of the remaining film. Objects move with almost painful slowness, and while spatial direction has become arbitrary in the weightlessness of space (demonstrated by the many movements against traditional ideas of gravity), time and duration remain factors that man is still enslaved to.

All three films seem to make a point about the fact that man cannot escape the power that time has over him, La Jetée and 2001 support this fact in their spatial representations of time. However, all three films also suggest that there is one variable that allows every individual and humankind as a whole to conquer time, at least to a certain extent. It is something everyone possesses and it has a quality that makes us distinctly human: memory.

Memory is a feature of our physiology that we depend upon constantly, not just when we are conscious of it. It makes us retain information in almost every mental task we perform. But memory also plays a pivotal part in moulding the identity of all of mankind’s humanity. We are human beings because we remember that we are, and because we remember where we come from.

One of the central tasks of science fiction narratives has always been to question the nature of humanity, which is best achieved by contrasting a human being with some kind of Other. Since memory (and action derived from memory) is one of the factors that make us essentially human, it is also a key concept that connects the three selected films.

La Jetée, even in its opening lines, explains that it is “the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.” The memory of the woman the protagonist has seen on the pier at Orly, a memory “whose meaning he was to grasp only years later” provides the key to the time travelling device the victors of the war have developed: they are using “men with very strong mental images.” “The hero is not sent into his memory; rather his memory is used as a force that helps him to re-enter the past” (Kawin 16), because, as it is explained in the film, “moments to remember are just like other moments.” And so the hero’s memories from peaceful times become real: “a peacetime bedroom” becomes “a real bedroom.” He is able to travel through time, because he remembers his past.

Although the memory that haunts him ultimately leads to his death, this death is his destiny. It is only through this destiny that he can imprint the memory on his younger self, which essentially makes him save humanity. Just like the higher beings from the future, he cannot “refuse to [his] own past the means of [his] own survival.”

The importance of memory for the essence of humanity in 2001 is maybe a bit less evident, but it still plays an important role. In the first segment of the film, the monolith teaches one of the apes, called Moonwatcher in the original script for the film, how to use tools. When he uses them for the first time, hitting the skeleton of a tapir with one of its bones, images of another dying tapir are intercut, followed by shots of the apes eating meat. Moonwatcher has remembered the force of his tool and used it for hunting – taking an important step in the development of the human race. Later, he remembers again, and uses his tool to defeat the leader of the enemy tribe, who, without the memory of the tool, appears naturally inferior and less human.

Subsequently, memory becomes an even more important element to distinguish humanity from its Others. The key figure in this case is the HAL 9000 computer, which, as the BBC interviewer in the film describes, “can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word ‘mimic’, most of the activities of the human brain,” a fact that prompts astronaut Frank Poole to describe him as “a sixth member of the crew.” Thus, HAL seems to be able to act exactly like a human being, and, just like a human being, he apparently starts developing human emotions: pride, defiance, jealousy, and fear.

Consequently, when HAL starts acting irrationally and kills the members of the crew, Dave Bowman has to deactivate HAL’s humanity. He does so by entering the computer’s “Logic Memory Center” and unplugging, one by one, HAL’s memory circuits, reducing him to his basic functions of monitoring the ship. HAL, accordingly, begs Dave to stop: “Dave, my mind is going.” Unable to remember anything, the pseudo-humanity the computer had established, vanishes. Only Dave, the single remaining human in the orbit of Jupiter, may conquer time and travel through the space-gate beyond the infinite.

Solaris

It is in Solaris that the connection between humanity and memory reveals itself in the most immediate way. Psychologist Chris Kelvin travels to the space station hovering above the ocean Solaris, which sends the inhabitants of the station ‘visitors’, beings it extracts from their memories. These beings, however, are not humans. They are “simulacra made not of ordinary matter but of neutrinos […]. They are a physical embodiment of all the temptations, desires and suppressed guilt that torment the human mind”, as Maya Turovskaya put it in her essential book on Tarkovsky (51).

Chris’s visitor is his ex-wife Hari, who committed suicide ten years before his space voyage. The Hari who visits Chris is conscious, but she has no memories: “Who am I?” she says as she looks into a mirror. “As soon as I close my eyes I can’t recall what my face looks like.” Because she is just an image extracted from her husband’s mind, without a recollection of anything that came before, she is essentially inhuman: “One cannot be a human being without knowing ‘love for the graves of our ancestors’” (Turovskaya 56).

When Hari asks Chris if he knows who he is, he answers: “Yes, all humans do.” However, it is difficult enough for the human inhabitants of the space station to remember who they are. The station is “filled with memories of Earth, with the fruits of its culture as well as the perfect mechanisms that are the fruits of its technology,” as Turovskaya notes (55). We are “graphically reminded of how limited [the lives of the inhabitants] are by the rustle of strips of paper on the station, reminding the space scientists of the rustling of leaves in the same distant way that a page of shorthand reminds us of living speech” (ibid.).

Hence, Hari has to learn how to become human by recalling memories step by step, in the same way that Chris has to regain his humanity by rediscovering his feelings for her. It is the seemingly inhuman Hari, who stands up for humanity and defends Chris in front of his cynical colleagues: “I think Chris is more logical than both of you. In these inhuman conditions, he alone acted human. […] Your visitors are part of you, they are your conscience.” In Turovskaya’s words:

In spite of being born out of nothing, [Hari] comes to know, together with Chris, the strange and detailed world of the ‘Winter Morning’ which Brueghel’s picture spreads over the convex surface of the earth. A short piece of film from Earth preserves something both intimate and unrepeatable, but which belongs to the whole of humanity. (56)

In the end, Chris “puts all that is most human in him at the disposal of science, and agrees to an experiment whereby his inner world is projected down on to the Ocean” (ibid.). The next morning, the visitors are gone. Hari has fulfilled her destiny which has always been to sacrifice herself and Chris’s memories have broken the infinite loop of time and memory.

All three films, then, use science fiction tropes such as time travel, alien intelligences and supercomputers to illustrate at least one common point: Man may be trapped in time, but his memory of the past allows him to retain humanity, and thus something like freedom, even in a deterministic universe. By remembering what they know of their own past, the characters become distinctly human and can fulfil their human destinies.

“We’re the intermediary” – An Interview with Craig Hanna from Thinkwell Design

For my article about movie tie-in theme park attractions, I interviewed Craig Hanna in June 2009. Craig Hanna is Chief Creative Officer of Thinkwell Design, one of the leading design companies in the amusement park world, who have designed and built attractions all over the globe – also in Germany. The interview was done via e-mail and has been slightly edited.

Real Virtuality: How does Thinkwell go about designing a new movie tie-in attraction?

Craig Hanna: We start by meeting with the owner of the intellectual property to understand what the essence of their IP is. What’s the heart and soul of that movie or animation or product. Often, the owner of the intellectual property isn’t the developer of the project. The developer often licenses the intellectual property from a studio. We then serve as an intermediary between the owner/operator and the IP holder. We have to create an experience that meets the business, financial, schedule and operational goals while ensuring the creative and production on the project remains true to the original IP.

How do you decide what kind of ride to design or is there often a wish from the client?

Sometimes the client knows what kind of attraction they want, but typically we start with the IP and decide what will be most appropriate to go with the IP and if the project is going into an existing park, we’ll look at the overall mix of attractions to ensure what we’re creating is complimentary to the other offerings. Obviously, making sure the attraction type fits perfectly with the IP is key. To understand our process, the best way to learn it is to to go to our website.

What makes a good (movie) attraction (whether it is a coaster, ride, show, etc.)?

When considering an IP for an attraction there must always be an inherent attraction or ride already residing within the IP. “Serious” films without action or dramatic stories with lots of dialogue don’t work very well for attractions. Animated films, action films, big sci-fi films and films with great chase, stunt or fight sequences obviously work great. Of course, the IP needs to be popular and known with the general public, otherwise, why bother?

Is Disney’s Imagineering still the big role model?

Disney is always going to be the role model, but Universal is as well. Universal have done more movie-based attractions in the last two decades than Disney has, bringing blockbuster films to life. When the Harry Potter land and attractions open at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, it will be the culmination of all the work in creating IP attractions that has come before it.

How important is good Theming to a working theme park, especially when you get to build a whole park from scratch as in Korea? How do you achieve it?

Theming is expensive. So, you start with looking at the overall financial considerations for the park. How much can the client spend to build the park? That gives you a general rule of thumb in terms of overall quality. Most parks add theming for theming’s sake. There’s little correlation between this land and that, other than to provide some character and give visitors a chance to escape from the normal world. When we develop theme parks we look at theming as part of the storytelling of the park, what we call Environmental Storytelling. It is all part of a unique process we developed called Content Masterplanning. Just as an architect will develop a land-use plan and an overall park masterplan, we masterplan the content of the park. Every aspect of the park – every land, building, attraction, store and restaurant-must support and work synergistically with that story. Every element, visual and audio cue the guest experiences, sees, hears, touches or even tastes, must reinforce thet story. Anything else is extraneous and often contradictory to the message and must be discarded in design phases.

How important is it that an attraction ties in seamlessly with the existing intellectual property (i.e. shooting footage of the original actors, music etc.)?

Ideally, an IP-based attraction would incorporate all elements from the original film, but that’s often not the case. Typically, an IP is licensed long after the film is produced, because most clients don’t want to take a chance licensing something before it’s popularity is proven. Given that, being able to work with the original actors is a lot harder. A new deal must be made, oftentimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more!). Most studios don’t include attraction rights and waivers in their contracts with producers and actors, so each IP must be vetted by legal and the appropriate deals made.

How does a ride keep up its appeal? When does it get obsolete?

A good attraction is timeless, often outliving the appeal of the original intellectual property. Take “Waterworld” at Universal Studios Hollywood and Japan, for example. That film was considered a “bomb” by Hollywood standards, yet the stunt show is considered one of the top-rated attractions at both parks. The Men in Black movies have been out of theatres for nearly a decade, yet the ride at Universal Studios Florida is still one of the most popular.

Could you explain, how the proceedings were when you were contracted to do the “Ice Age Adventure” in Germany? How did you develop the property, the ride, how did you expand the movie into the ride?

We were contacted by Star Parks because of our expertise in creating IP-based attractions. They had to remove the Warner Bros. intellectual properties because their purchase of the park didn’t include the WB IP. Star Parks had to remove the Looney Tunes attraction. We brokered the relationship between 20th Century Fox and Star Parks to bring Ice Age to the park. Star Parks was worried about the cost of licensing a blockbuster IP, but we convinced them it wouldn’t cost as much as they feared. The project was less than nine months from start to finish, which is about a third of the amount of time it would typically take to complete such an attraction. Fortunately, we kept the existing ride system and reworked much of the existing scenery from the old ride to work with the new IP.

We never want to simply recreate the original IP. That becomes too much of what you’ve already seen and offers no new surprises. We create what we like to call a “1.5 sequel”. Not really a sequel (we leave that to the Hollywood movie writers!), but something based on what you know and love from the original blockbuster movie, but then goes beyond it. That’s what we did with „Ice Age Adventure“. Fortunately, unbeknownst to us, our storyline was very similar to what Blue Sky Studios was developing for the sequel, Ice Age 2. We worked closely with Fox and Blue Sky to develop the story, got their approvals quickly and went to work completing the design and fabrication to make opening day for the new season as Movie Park Germany.

Blue Sky was very helpful. They provided their 3D computer models of the characters to us to allow us to do CNC carvings for the figures rather than traditional hand sculpting, which saved weeks, if not months, in production. I flew to New York and met with the producers and director of the films, got to meet the animators and understand the essence of the IP. Later, our designers worked with their animators to pose the characters from the film for our ride. It was a great process. In the beginning, to save time, we sent a team to Movie Park, where we worked on-site in temporary offices they provided for us. We quickly developed the initial concept and full presentation to executive management, complete with layout, storyboards, scene descriptions and script in one week. We nearly killed ourselves on that project! The night before opening, the last shipment of animatronics arrived from the United States and we all were in waders walking through the filled trough carrying animated figures through the ride to get them loaded in, installed and wired in time for the park’s opening the next day!

Was working in Germany different from working anywhere else?

Working in Germany was excellent. The people at the park in operations and maintenance were very helpful. The weather was extremely cold, which isn’t very familiar to a group of people from Los Angeles, but we work all over the world and are used to all kinds of cultures and climates.

Any other challenges you ran into during that period?

The cost to license the soundtrack from Ice Age was prohibitive, so we hired a composer from Cirque du Soleil and created our own that was reminiscent of the movie’s theme, but was actually a wholly-new piece.

We also had to hire German voice actors to do the voices of the characters for the ride. The ones that did the voiceovers for the movie in German were too expensive, so we hired other sound-alike voices. It ended up those actors were famous German comedians that were more popular than the people who did the voices from the movie originally (NB: The comedian who voices Sid the Sloth in the German version, Otto Waalkes, is something of a national institution in Germany, probably in the way the Pythons are in Britain, the other voices aren’t, A.G.)!

When the ride first opened we had a preshow scene where the cave paintings from the movie came to life and told the backstory of each character of the ride, just in case you weren’t familiar with the Ice Age movies. Not long after opening, Movie Park executives decided to change that scene to something with a live narrative. I miss those original “magical petroglyphs” because it was a special moment that wordlessly explained the entire backstory of the film. We spent a lot of time on original animation to do it and the folks at Blue Sky Studios really liked what we had done to expand the story.

This is one part of a four-part package on film tie-in attractions in theme parks. The other three are a feature article, a post on how the article came about, and an interview with Barry Upson (formerly Universal Studios).

“The days of of ‘Build it and they shall come’ are over – An Interview with Theme Park Veteran Barry Upson

For my article about movie tie-in theme park attractions, I interviewed Barry Upson in June 2009. Barry was the executive in charge of the concept, facility design, construction and operation of the original Univeral Studios Tour in Hollywood. For twenty years, from 1979 to 1999, he was executive vice president of Universal Creative. Among other things, he managed the Master Planning of Universal City Florida. He now works as a consultant in his own company. The interview was done via e-mail. It has been slightly edited.

Real Virtuality: Please describe your motivations and the steps you took back when you were creating Universal’s Studio Park. What did you consider back then?

Barry Upson: A little history. In 1914 Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Studios, invited paid guests to view shooting of silent films from bleachers on the lot. The first movie studio “tour” was attended by 500 people per day. During the 1920’s through the 1960’s and beyond, several studios operated small, exclusive walking tours of their lots (Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, etc.). As you know, Disney used their cartoon and animated film, characters widely in the creation of Disneyland. Universal permitted Grayline Tour Buses to drive through the studio (for a fee) in the late 1950’s. Passengers saw film clips, a make-up show and ate lunch in the Commissary.

The Grayline experience convinced Universal management that there was a business in a working studio tour for several reasons: There obviously was a huge pent-up demand to go “behind the scenes”, see how movies are made, maybe see “stars”. The tour allowed for the promotion of prime time TV shows, of which a majority were being filmed at Universal at the time and offered the possibility of creating new revenue from an existing plant. A tram tour could be routed hourly to either expose or avoid shooting companies as circumstances demanded.

At the outset, and for several ensuing years (1964 to 1980), the studio tram tour and the tour guides were the “stars” and the tram special effects and shows were the “bit players” at Universal. Early tram impacting attractions (Collapsing Bridge; Red Sea Parting; Ice Tunnel; Flash Flood; Runaway Train, etc.) were themed and presented as 4-D film-like special effects – not necessarily tied to specific movies or TV shows. Early very simple effects demonstrations in the tour center were more directly tied to a title: “Creatures From the Black Lagoon”; “Frankenstein”. Original stunt and animal shows (and screen test theater) were generic “behind the scenes” presentations.

By 1980, Universal Tour attendance levels made Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm direct competitors. Larger, bolder and more recognizable attractions were needed to compete and build attendance. This is when “rights” (IPR’s) started to become a major issue. During the 1980’s, major attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood were based on the storyline or adopted the theme and/or name of major Universal IP’s. Examples are the “Conan Show” (live actor-animation), the “A-Team” live action stunt show, the “King Kong” Tram attraction with major figure animation, the “Earthquake” drive-through with major special effects and the “Castle Dracula” live theater attraction.

Even gaining these exclusive rights internally was often difficult and costly because of cast deals, partnerships, etc.

How did you walk the line between creating things that were both “real”, i.e. credible, and entertaining at the same time?

The most boring aspect of movies and TV is the actual filming process and even that can be overcome with the on-set presence of “stars”. Since most, if not all of Universal’s attractions are based on a final film product or selected compelling components of the process (stunts, animals, screen tests, etc.) there was never really a line between “real” and “entertaining” – the attractions had to be both. The studio environment is also always “real” in its own way.

Have any of these motivations or proceedings changed, esp. later when the park in its current form developed?

The motivation is generally the same. Theme parks want to create a compelling guest experience, they want to adhere effectively to a theme or storyline. They have to build attendance, beat the competition, keep to a budget and schedule and make a profit.

Possible proceedings to achieve this are: work on a grander scale, improve the design dteails, use more complex content or infrastructure, achieve a higher capacity and use more sophisticated operations and maintenance.

Securing exclusive rights to strong film properties from any source is more critical now to creating an attraction that cannot be duplicated competitively. Universal Studios Florida would not exist except for Spielberg Film rights. The same is true for Universal’s Islands of Adventure with Spider-Man, Dr. Seuss, Dudly Doright, etc.

Is it different making movie attractions then and now? What has changed, what has stayed the same?

A realistic evaluation of potential market size and composition and effective response to it is more critical today. The days of of “Build it and they shall come” are over.

Other than dealing with the design/development and business practice differences of producing attractions or parks overseas as opposed to the United States, I think the fundamental creative process is the same. At both Universal and Disney, the basic concept is created in-house with design extension done by highly experienced outside firms and fabrication/construction done by the most qualified companies worldwide.

What are the important aspects one has to consider first and foremost when creating a new attraction based on movies?

The most important factors in building a good movie attraction are exclusive I.P.R. Rights, a “pre-sold” successful movie or TV theme, a simple, powerful storyline or concept and a compelling, cohesive guest experience. Moreover you need an adequate schedule and budget, high quality consultants and purveyors, an adequate capacity for minimal wait times, effective experience set-up in the queue line or pre-show. You will want to minimize cannibalization of attendance at other primary park attractions and finally you will need xcellent marketing.

Many Theme Parks simply adopt a movie/t.v. title as a name for a standard iron ride or Show. Universal, Disney and Warners built their attractions around the basic premise of the film. There is a world of difference in these two strategies.

How do you decide which movie to turn into a ride or other attraction?

How to “decide” is based on any number of different factors depending on circumstanc: It’s having an appropriate theme within the park’s attraction mix and a key scene/storyline that will drive a compelling attraction concept. Rights availability and a need for a distinct competitive edge in the park’s market almost always influence the decision. Often the basic idea is market tested with consumer groups and the outcome of those tests can be the final decision maker.

Does the technology inspire the art or vice versa?

Whether “art” or “technology” inspires attraction concepts can best be described by some examples. The “Back To The Future” ride was inspired by the DeLorean scenes in film. Its replacement, the “Simpsons” ride is character driven. The “E.T.” Ride follows E.T.’s film journey home. All the “Dr. Seuss” Attractions at Universal Islands of Adventure are based on original stories and the “T2-3D” Attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood is basically single character-driven. So you could say they were inspired by the “art”. However, “Earthquake”, as part of the Studio Tour, was made possible by very large-scale environmental animation. “Spider-Man” is a unique, complex marriage of 3-D film, animation and ride and has the vehicle at the heart of the attraction. With “Backdraft”, large scale, real fire effects are the show and the “Jurrasic Park Ride” was shaped by the only available hillside site at Universal Studios Hollywood..

How important is good Theming to a working theme park?

You will find many in our industry that think the term “theming” is really overused in almost every facet of our life and has become a cliché. However, true theming is still critical to successful park development and operations. Good park theming is seeing to it that everything in the park contributes positively to its central story line and to a compelling, cohesive guest experience: no jarring, non-thematic events, services or facilities are allowed. This is easier said than done, but it is vital to success. Disney understands and executes theming as well or better than anyone, yet I believe they would be the first to admit that the theme environment of California Adventure was mediocre at best and impacted attendance.

Effectively linking a film’s elements to its name-sake attraction through images, dialogue, sound effects, musical score, and special effects is always desirable because it grounds the guest more strongly in that specific entertainment experience. There are many good examples of these film/attractions linkages at Universal and Disney parks: “Spider-Man”, “Simpsons”, “T2-3D” among them. Universal has just installed a state-of-the-art A/V system in their Universal Hollywood trams that permits guests to view scenes from films while traveling through the sets where they were shot, as well as other visual materials.

Is the theme park business a struggle sometimes? Did you ever terminate a project because you had the feeling it didn’t connect well enough with the movie it emulated?

I actually have quite a few war stories about both winning and losing battles in the Park/Attraction development wars. They range from rocks bouncing into trams during the rockslide effect and a real earthquake at the “Earthquake” attraction that is part of the Studio Tour. At Universal’s Islands of Adventure, the perfect animation of a Triceratops was not good enough for the guests and in one case, an entire park concept had to be scrapped due to competitive gamesmanship: about 1979, Universal planned to move the Hollywood park concept of backlot tram tour and entertainment center to Orlando, Florida, which is Disney territory. In seeking a partner for the project, Universal made presentations to Paramount and a few other studios at the time. Shortly thereafter, Disney announced plans to build an MGM-Disney Theme Park at Walt Disney World…fundamentally the same park concept that Universal was planning. Universal elected to proceed anyway, dropped the tram tour component and created the first, true Movie Theme Park concept: Universal Studios Florida.

How does a ride keep up its appeal? When does it get obsolete?

An attraction keeps its appeal by remaining relevant to its market and to the primary entertainment mission of the park. It becomes “obsolete” when the original Film or TV. base drops from sight (e.g. “E.T.”), when the technology becomes passé or when we find that the site or facility is better used for a new attraction.

What is in stock for the future of theme parks?

Ah, the future. Ten years ago, I gave a speech at IAAPA (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) entitled: “The Future Just Passed By…Did We Miss It?” The premise was that the basic ideas that will drive the future of the themed entertainment industry are already out there in some form. We just have to recognize them. I still believe that.

Can you think of a current example that embodies your philosophy about movie theme park attractions best?

I think the recent conversion of the “Back to the Future” attraction to the “Simpsons” attraction was a brilliant concept and has proved highly successful. The original concept for “Back to the Future” offered the opportunity to create new software for the existing facility and ride system and it worked.

The new Harry Potter Land at Universal’s Islands of Adventure should be a smash hit because of deep involvement by the original film makers, particularly its art director, and a commitment of land, budget and creative team by Universal to fully exploit the strength and appeal of the theme subject.

This is one part of a four-part package on film tie-in attractions in theme parks. The other three are a feature article, a post on how the article came about, and an interview with Craig Hanna (Thinkwell Design).

How Theme Parks make Movies Inhabitable

If you want to experience interactive cinema, don’t go the cinema. It’s in theme parks, where you can experience the thrill of living inside your favourite movies. This article explains, how it is done.

Probably, the idea is as old as art itself. It existed already when the ancient Greeks painted perspective backdrops for their plays: aesthetic immersion, the attempt to draw the audience into the fiction of the artwork; to provide it not only with an intellectual but with a physical experience.

Today, in media society, immersion – from Latin immersio, to submerge – seems almost complete. The cinema of blockbuster attractions does everything it can with rapid camera moves, booming sound systems, brilliant colours and the newest 3D-effects to offer the spectator just that: forgetting the world around you, almost touching the fantastic, diving into the world of artifice.

Cinema’s predecessor, as well as its companion, were panoramas and similar fairground attractions, whose appeal didn’t lie primarily in the phenomenon of moving pictures as such, but rather in the perfect surround experience, supported by sounds, smoke effects and mechanical movement. Even back then, the most popular source material was provided be spectacular events, real or imagined: enormous battles or adventurous journeys, as in Frederic Thompsons „Trip to the Moon“ , an illusionistic spectacle full of moving canvasses and haunted house elements. The attraction premiered in 1901 and drew huge crowds to Coney Island’s „Luna Park“ just outside New York City for several years from 1903 onward.

Technology and artistic vision come face to face in these attractions, just like they do in film. Their creators shy away from nothing to establish the perfect experience. When he started to work on designs that would transfer the vortex-like cinematic effect of his animated movies, achieved through an insistance on all-singing, all-dancing hyperrealism, onto the overarching concept of an amusement park in 1951, Walt Disney became one of them.

Disneyland opened in 1955. The employees of its development company called themselves Imagineers – a portmanteau of „imagination“ and „engineers“. In its four park areas, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland and Fantasyland, every detail is „themed“ to match the respective area’s concept, from plant life and the costumes of the employees (called „cast members“) down to the garbage cans. Paths are constructed in such a way that you rarely spot the other lands if you are walking through one of them. so the impression is never jarred. The area is mined by tunnels, allowing the cast members to move about without disturbing the guests: work makes itself invisible. Only the centre of the park, the Sleeping Beauty Castle, now a brand in itself, is always visible.

Disneyland is „at the same time absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic“, wrote Umberto Eco in 1973. If the visitor brings the appropriate attitude, he can lose himself in Disneyland – not in a specific movie, but in the stuff that movies are made of. The escapist element of Hollywood’s dream factory: in theme parks it becomes a reality. The spectator becomes a user, a protagonist in his own film.

The parks owned by Universal Studios, in Hollywood, Florida and Japan, are – broadly speaking – not as playful as their Disney equivalents. Nevertheless, they allow the audience to intimately immerse itself in movies. Even in the silent era, Universal founder Carl Laemmle supplemented his studio’s income by letting visitors tour the backlot. In 1964, building on Lammle’s legacy, Universal opened its now-legendary Studio Tour in which guests are driven around parts of the property in a trolley car.

Nowadays, the Tour’s real behind-the-scenes part, which destroys rather than creates illusions, is kept to a minimum. Instead, the cars pass a collapsing bridge, the passengers witness an earthquake and a flash flood and may watch the Jaws shark gobble up a diver. In the eighties, when Universal felt capable of competing with Disney in the theme park market, the studio also began to build parks with attractions based on the films it had produced, first in Hollywood than elsewhere. Disney has, in turn, adapted the backlot concept and opened parks like „Walt Disney Studios“ in Paris.

„The most boring aspect of movies and TV. is the actual filming process“, says Barry Upson, one of the creators of the original tour, who became executive vice president of Universal’s recreational division in 1979 and remained there until 1999. The newer attractions were built on highlighting a film’s gripping aspects. They were also fully themed.

This can mean several things. In many cases, the main attraction is preceded by a pre-show that works like a title sequence, explaining connections to the ur-film and introducing characters and setting. The building housing the attraction is often designed after one of the sites in the film’s universe: Thus, the „Simpsons“-Ride is set in a fairground in Springfield, „Star Tours“ plays out in a space station in a galaxy far far away, „Shrek 4D“ drops the audience into Lord Farquaads dungeon.

Just as often, hovever, it seems enough to evoke a well-known film’s visual vocabulary while you are waiting in line. Signs use symbols and fonts employed in the film. Announcements like „Keep your hands inside the vehicle during the ride“ are acted out by the film’s characters on monitors or via audio broadcasts. Because the waiting can take an hour or longer, the observant visitor has had more than enough time to remember the scenes he loved when he finally takes a seat. By that time, he is in the centre of the universe he will subsequently be propelled through via rollercoaster, motion simulator or „4D-cinema“ – the 4th dimension usually consists of shaking seats and a few jets of water.

To optimise their immersive effects, Universal rides as well as newer attractions in parks by Disney and Warner Bros. Worldwide, usually start with the basic idea of the film and build the ride around it. This doesn’t mean that rides cannot later be „re-themed“. The „Simpsons“ ride at Universal Studios Hollywood used to be a trip Back to the Future in the DeLorean. And rides without specific cinematic source material can become movies in their own right, as Gore Verbinskis Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy has proven.

When a new attraction is created, the first step consists of thinking about whether the trouble is worth it. „’Serious’ films without action or dramatic stories with lots of dialog don’t work very well“, says Craig Hanna, chief creative officer of Thinkwell Design in Burbank, who have built rides for pretty much every major player in the industry. „Animated films, action films, big sci-fi films and films with great chase, stunt or fight sequences obviously work great“ It’s also important that the film was succesful and has established itself as a brand.

At the core of the design process should be the film or intellectual property’s essence: „We serve as an intermediary between the owner or operator and the IP holder“, says Hanna. „We have to create an experience that meets the business, financial, scheduling and operational goals, while ensuring the creative idea and production on the project remains true to the original IP“

Hanna and Upson agree that harmonic thematic design is essential for an exceptional amusement park. When the Theming is right, says Upson, „everything in the park contributes positively to its central story line.“ Hanna agrees: „When we develop theme parks we look at theming as part of the storytelling of the park, what we call Environmental Storytelling“. Just as an architect will develop a land-use plan, the company designing the attractions creates the masterplan for the content of the narrative architecture: „Every element, visual and audio cue the guest experiences, sees, hears, touches or even tastes, must reinforce the park’s story“

The process is expensive, the designer admits. With attractions based on Film-IPs, it would be ideal if the company could only employ original elements from the film. Often, however, the rights for theme park attractions are not part of the license agreements that studios sign with actors or producers. Because they would have to be negotiated anew in these cases, the Theme Parks sometimes find ways around them.

Hanna names the work on „Ice Age Adventure“ as an example, a ride built by Thinkwell at „Movie Park“, formerly „Warner Bros. Movie World“, in Bottrop, Germany. The attraction is a so-called „dark ride“: the passengers pass by illuminated dioramas populated with animatronic puppets telling a story. In this case, they are telling a „1.5 sequel“ as Hanna calls it, to the first Ice Age movie.

„The ride is not really a sequel, we leave that to the screenwriters“, says Hanna. „But it is based on what you know and love from the original movie“. The idea of the „semi-sequel“ is popular: a similar concept is at the heart of the „Shrek 4D“-film, also at Bottrop, or its more spectacular cousin: a combination of 3D-film and stage show in an expansion of Terminator 2’s universe at Universal Studios Hollywood.

For the „Ice Age Adventure“, the film’s original score and German voice talents were too expensive and had to be imitated for the ride. However, Hanna explains, Thinkwell was able to use the original wireframe models of US animation studio Blue Sky as a base for their puppets.

One of the few film-based rides where both intellectual property and ride design hail from Germany is the 4-D-Film „Lissi und die wilde Kaiserfahrt“ („Lissi and the wild Kaiser’s ride“) at Bavaria Filmstadt in Munich. Here, the partners could build on close cooperation. Nico Rössler, the Filmstadt’s director, Thomas Zauner, CEO of visual effects company Scanline and writer/director/actor Michael „Bully“ Herbig had worked together several times before.

Realized within the limits of theme park financing in Germany – the project cost a „six-digit amount“, says Rössler – the „Wilde Kaiserfahrt“ also is a sort of 1.5-sequel to Herbig’s animated feature Lissi und der wilde Kaiser („Lissi and the wild Kaiser“, a parody of the classic German film trilogy about princess Elisabeth „Sissi“ of Austria starring Romy Schneider). The ride draws about 400.000 to 500.000 visitors per year, since it opened in October 2007. It is based on a scene from the film in which the caricature of the classic „Sissi“-character is chased down a snowy slope in a life raft by two poachers. The 3D-film adds a few locations to the original scene and makes the spectator part of the chase. A vintage hydraulic gimble gives the seats a good shake and an IOSONO sound system courtesy of the Fraunhofer institute, which is able to place sound effects anywhere in the room with the help of several hundred speakers, allows for a unique sonic adventure.

The centre of attention here is definitely the general experience, not the immersion in an alien world. There is also not much Theming to speak of: While the antechamber to the cinema is decorated in a mock baroque style reminiscent of the film, the screening room itself is naked, not least because the sound system doesn’t allow otherwise, as Rössler explains. However, this does fit in with the concept of the whole park, says the Filmstadt’s director. It’s not primarily content that’s on display here, but well-known film personalities and brands combined with a look behind the scenes of filmmaking in Germany.

On the other end of the spectrum, the „Wizarding World of Harry Potter“, which just opened its gates in Orlando, Florida, clearly aims at pushing the envelope when it comes to engulfing its visitors in fantasy. The park allows guests to explore the world of the famous sorcerer’s apprentice close up. The hub of the compound is a reconstructed Hogwarts, flanked by the wizarding village Hogsmeade and several rides. The park’s website also features immersive techniques: by means of „augmented reality“, the user can project holographic images onto his own hand with his webcam.

A visit to Ollivanders wand shop, where a wand chooses the visitor and not vice versa, mirroring the books, promises to be one of the highlights of the „Wizarding World“. In Theme Parks, if everything works as it should, it is only when you exit through the obligatory gift shop that waits at the end of every attraction, that you notice it is time to leave the waters of the film world you were swimming in.

A German version of this article appeared in epd film 7/10

This is one part of a four-part package on film tie-in attractions in theme parks. The other three are a post on how this article came about, and interviews with <a href="Barry Upson (formerly Universal Studios) and Craig Hanna (Thinkwell Design).

Theme Park Package

In May 2009, I visited California for the first time. As is the custom, I also visited the Universal Studios park. I always liked theme parks, but what I experienced there really blew my mind. I loved the attention the rides paid to every detail and the way how the creators managed to make the films on which the rides were based come alive again: An Idea for an article was born.

I pitched the article to my editors at epd film and they agreed to let me work on it. I looked for interview partners in the states and I travelled to Munich’s Bavaria Filmpark to investigate how the Germans do it. Thomas Zauner and Nico Rössler from Scanline and Bavaria Filmstadt were very generous with their time, as were Barry Upson, formerly of Universal Studios Recreation Group, and Craig Hanna, CCO of Thinkwell.

The article came together while I visited Disneyland Paris for the first time in October. However, by that time, the season for theme parks in Europe had already passed and the editors decided to postpone the article until this summer. Now, it has finally appeared in print.

For my American interviewees, I translated the article into English. I will post this article, as well as the unabridged versions of the interviews I did with Craig and Barry, in this blog. Please enjoy.

This is one part of a four-part package on film tie-in attractions in theme parks. The other three are a feature article, and interviews with Barry Upson (formerly Universal Studios) and Craig Hanna (Thinkwell Design).

DVD Lovers Do It with Audio-Commentary: Jurassic Park III

Yes, I am serious. Jurassic Park III, one of the strangest sequels in film history, has a great audio commentary track – if you like the Jurassic Park (2001) films as well as visual and/or special effects.

I even think the film isn’t half bad. I only saw it recently and didn’t expect much, probably because Jurassic Park was such a defining film for both my youth and my academic work on realism in visual effects and The Lost World was an incredible disappointment. The good thing about JP3 (as the commentary people call it) is that it doesn’t make any pretensions: It’s an old-fashioned monster movie where a group of talented actors hobble from one dino-encounter to the next without too much of a tacky back story. The dinosaurs clearly are the stars and the actor’s don’t try to change that. They just go along with the fun.

The commentary consists of Special Effects Legend Stan Winston together with his visual and practical effects colleagues Dan Taylor, John Rosengrant and Michael Lantieri sitting in the studio and chatting not just about JP3, but about the way the effects developed throughout the whole series. They change between ignoring the action on the screen completely and discussing it very precisely shot by shot.

It’s this change that makes the commentary so interesting. Sometimes you can just lean back and listen to the pros talk about the buildup of digital techniques and, even more interesting, about the progress made in puppeteering. In key scenes, however, the crew switches to pointing out what is real and what is digital in every single shot we see.

The amazing thing, that I would never have believed possible, is that Winston and his chums are sometimes lost themselves about which dinosaur is a practical effect and which is digitally inserted. If even they can’t discern it and don’t remember it, they can be sure they did a pretty good job. I thought that after all these years I would have a good eye for effects as well, but I was equally stumped.

Whenever the filmmakers are lost for words, they start commending the actors’ performances and the genius of director Joe Johnston, which is highly annoying. And while the end credits roll, Dan Taylor reads out and endless list of people he thanks for working on the movie, which is a bit boring.

The early noughties were something of a pinnacle for realistic-looking effects-driven films before Lord of the Rings dragged everyone into colour grading and green screen orgies. Hearing four professionals talk about the way to the top and actually being there when they get confused about their own work is both entertaining and highly educational.

DVD Lovers Do It with Audio-Commentary

(Photo: M. Keefe)

I’ve decided I should blog more in English (to cater to that great international audience out there), and since this post is the start of a new series that I will be loosely posting in fits and starts whenever I feel like it, I decided that I might as well begin (and continue) it in English.

What will this series be about? It will be about one of my favourite features of the DVD age, other than being able to watch movies in their original language: the audio-commentary. The feature has intrigued me ever since I started discovering DVDs in the late 90s, and I try to listen to as many commentary tracks as I have time for. So this series will feature a few musings about commentaries in general and some examples of what I find to be outstanding audio commentaries. Because, as most people who have listened to commentary tracks will know – there are good ones, bad ones and ugly ones.

“Most people” is a good way to start this series off, because I have noticed that the “most people” above does not equal “most people who watch DVDs”. Even a lot of film lovers rarely bother with the bonus material on DVDs and even if they do, the audio-commentary is usually last on their list. It’s not too hard to understand why. They take a long time (because you have to watch the whole film again) and they can be a very boring rehash of stuff you knew anyway or read in interviews. Sometimes they spoil the illusion of the film – and if you don’t like that, well, then you just don’t.

I recently linked to College Humor’s Commentary: The Movie – and a lot of audio-commentaries really are like that. They consist of people who love to hear themselves talk being either condescending towards the viewer, congratulary towards themselves or annoyingly admiring towards their actors and people they worked with. Other bad commentaries have directors speaking who clearly didn’t want to do a commentary track at all and have nothing to say.

But there are exceptions to the boredom. I truly love the feeling of watching a movie with the filmmaker right next to me, telling me what he was thinking while shooting or writing a scene, explaining how the filmmaking process worked its magic in a particular setpiece through a collaboration of people and fate. There’s two ways to watch a film: There’s the “suspension of disbelief” mode, in which you hope to drown in the diegetic world, and the “curious about how it was done” mode, in which you imagine that you’re actually standing behind the camera, shooting the scene you are watching. For the latter, audio-commentaries are perfect.

Good audio-commentaries often consist of a group of two to five people having a chat about making the film while they are watching it. It’s often better to have more than one person in the room, because this way it sounds less like an audio book and more like you, the listener, part of the team. And it’s better to actually have the people watching the film rather than having one narrator who then goes: “Let’s hear what Person X had to say about this scene” after which you can hear a clip from an interview.

Good audio-commentaries offer a mixture of insight into the filmmaking process (people actually explaining about how certain things happened) and fun (people joking about the process and giving you a little peek into the human side of filmmaking). Actors are rarely good audio-commentators unless they were involved in the movie through more than acting a role or a friends with the director. Writers are good commentators, as are special effects people. Composers usually have a hard time speaking about their music, although there are exceptions.

I wanted to follow up these general remarks with the recommendation of one great commentary I recently watched and that inspired the series, but since this post is already very long, I will save it for the next post.

Because there is everything on the internet, there is also a site that rates and recommends commentaries. I only just discovered it, so I am not sure if it recommendable itself.

“A Wiki Approach to News” – Mary Ann Giordano about “The Local”

The “New York Times” started two local neighbourhood-blogs for Brooklyn and New Jersey in March, a project that made Jeff Jarvis proclaim that “a wall just fell”, because it openly includes and actively promotes citizen journalism. Eight months after the launch, I interviewed editor Mary Ann Giordano for an article about hyperlocal blogs I wrote for German journal epd medien. The full article is not online and it is in German, but this is the full (English) interview, which I thought might also be of interest.

How has The Local been received?

The Local has been very well received, by all journalistic measures. Our readership is high, our repeat readership is very healthy, we draw many comments on our posts and we seem to have a loyal following of readers who see us — rightly — as a prime source for community news. But a better way to measure our success is to see how many posts are written, reported or tipped off by readers — community members who volunteer to write, report, shoot video, take photos or all of the above, because they are excited about The Local and they are interested in their communities. By our recent assessment, a solid 40 percent (and more) of our first 1,000 posts (we reached that milestone for both blogs around early October) were contributed wholly by members of the community. By my loose calculation, another 30 to 40 percent of the posts that our reporters or interns reported and wrote were inspired by readers’ tips or conversations in the comments. So we are well on our way to our goal to create community blogs, “covered by you and for you,” though there is much more that we can, and will, do.

What is the feedback from the people and the possible advertisers from the communities the two blogs cover?

The feedback from readers is largely good. We heard some criticism before we actually started the blogs, from people who were resentful that their communities were being “invaded” by the “mainstream media” institution of The New York Times. But that virtually disappeared. Readers sometimes don’t like what we write, or ask for some different things — more news seems to be the message we are getting in both Brooklyn and New Jersey — but they are largely complimentary of the sites. And, particularly in Brooklyn, they seem to turn to us immediately after the whiff of hard news in their neighborhoods (crime, a building collapse, the election).

However, we have garnered virtually no local advertising, mostly because we have not made much effort to get it. The business side of The New York Times has a wait-and-see attitude toward hyperlocal, which is probably very wise in this depressed economy when it takes effort just maintaining the advertising we already have. Some local businesses have reached out to us to place ads, and perhaps in the new year there will be more efforts to tap into this source of revenue. But for now, that has not been one of our measures of success.

Do people regularly become citizen journalists for you now? Or do they mostly point you towards important issues?

Both — see above. We have no shortage of content from the communities, much of it quite good. But we also get a lot of people pointing our staff reporters and interns towards stories and waiting to be delivered the news. Our response, more and more lately, is — “you tell US. What is going on outside your window? What do the police on the ground say? What happened at that community meeting?” And more and more they are coming back to us with quotes or photos or tips that find their way into posts.

What does your daily work look like? How does it differ from the work of classic print journalists? What were/are the reactions from the rest of the NYT?

The Local consists of two reporters: Tina Kelley, in Millburn, South Orange and Maplewood (where she lives), New Jersey; and Andy Newman in Fort Greene-Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. They start early in the morning, covering news, reporting stories, aggregating and curating content from other sites, supervising interns and recruiting local contributors who they then work with to produce posts. I supervise, direct, edit and read every single post before it is published, and also work directly with contributors and interns on their posts. The day is long — we are often up late, publishing breaking news or getting up late posts or using the relative quiet to plan and organize. And we are “on deadline” all the time. But we publish very sparingly on weekends, so do have those two days of rest. We communicate almost exclusively by e-mail or G-chat; except when we have meetings, we rarely talk. Since we each work independently, in different places, we miss out on the camaraderie and sociability of the newsroom, but such is the life of the lonely blogger! I think the greater newsroom has curiosity and interest in what we are doing, and we hope to include them more as the endeavor goes forward. The top management of the news organization is solidly behind our efforts. Eventually, the lessons we learn about collaborative journalism can be — and will be — incorporated into the greater newsroom, but first we will continue to test them in the laboratory we call “The Local.”

Do you think you will be making money eventually?

I sure hope so. A lot of people smarter than me think there will eventually be a pot of gold at the end of the hyperlocal rainbow — by some estimates $100 billion to be shared by local news sites/bloggers (by the way, we are best described as a news blog, because our main purpose is to impart real information and news, not opinion or ruminations). But for now our prime benefits are journalistic, as we explore this type of coverage and hone the techniques that go into it.

Is this an experiment, or is it the future of journalism? What do you think?

I think — and I only feel comfortable speaking for myself — that it is the future of journalism. Nothing will replace trained, professional journalists; although critics won’t admit it, I think that has been proven over and over again, with the best blog fodder still coming from news organizations that employ paid journalists and produce classic investigative and news reports. We believe the reason that our sites rise above many others is that we have experienced and talented journalists at the helm. But, overall, the old pull-up-the-drawbridge-and-issue-edicts approach is largely past. Instead, I believe that there will be a wiki approach to news, where we invite people into every aspect of the process while we supervise, guide and enhance the coverage. In the end, we think this will build a better report — and it already does: a published post with comments, corrections, updates and overall reader/community involvement can result in more precise journalism. That, in turn, builds reader trust. And that will, in the long run, save journalism, rather than kill it, I believe.